Venus Ann Michael shares five meditation practices that sharpen business thinking: guided apps like Calm and Insight Timer, journaling, Thích Nhất Hạnh's The Miracle of Mindfulness, and Transcendental Meditation. She connects each to concrete gains like better focus, less stress, clearer decisions, and stronger creativity.
meditation and mindfulness, talking about apps like Calm and Insight Timer are great for guided and timed meditations. Journaling, like you said, great way to process thoughts and offer clarity. Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, has many books with beautiful meditations, and I can totally recommend The Miracle of Mindfulness, a great introduction to that. But you yourself, you've done some—
TM, which is Transcendental Meditation.
Yeah, can you talk about that?
Yeah, I went through the training. My wife and I both did it. My conclusion, I'm not too familiar with other forms of meditation, but it's just a variant. I think any form of meditation is good. What I liked about TM is it's mantra-based, rephrase. So it's just you say the same words in your mind over and over again. But other forms of meditation could be just pay attention to your breathing, the center eye. All those things are just trying to give your focus to one area so that other things can flow out without being considered. It's the reduction of active thought. It's not easy to meditate. I was gonna say, yeah, group meditation ironically has been easier for me. There's— that means there's usually someone guiding you through the process. I also use YouTube. I'll log in, say, you know, pull up a meditation, and they walk you through it. So that's powerful.
